Finds: Hone's Christmas Gift

Dick Scott: Inheritors of a Dream (1962)

I found a copy of this old coffee-table book by Dick Scott in Greg Brimblecombe's little boutique secondhand bookshop "Dustjackets" in Thames the other day. It's a 1969 Reed reprint of the original 1962 edition, published by a certain Ronald Riddell (any relation of Ron Riddell the poet, I wonder?)

Dick Scott bio-note (1969)

Since this blurb was first written in 1962, of course, Dick Scott has published quite a lot more. You can find a good discussion of his work here. The most famous one is, I suppose, Ask That Mountain (1975), about Parihaka. My personal favourite, though, is Seven Lives on Salt River (1979), about the Kaipara harbour and its curious highways and byways.

Inscription in Inheritors of a Dream

On getting home and looking through the book a bit more thoroughly, I found the above inscription written on the half-title.

But is this our Hone? Hone Tuwhare? And who's Lindsay? Lindsay Rabbitt, the poet? Someone else? None of my business, of course, but one does feel a bit curious.

My inscribed copy of Mihi (1987)

To check, I went to my own copy of Mihi, signed for me by Hone on a rainy day in 1998.

So let's compare them:

1972 signature (detail)

1998 signature (detail)

I don't think there's much doubt that the "Hone" in question is definitely Hone Tuwhare. The elaborate "H" is enough to give it away even if there weren't so many other similarities.

That's not all there is in the book, though. Here's Dick Scott's introduction:

But then, on turning to p.29, I found an old letter nestled in beside the image below (ignore the rubric on the left, which refers to another image on the same page which I haven't reproduced):

Fern Tree Cottage

Here's the letter:

letter (page 1)

letter (page 2)

Fern Tree Cottage (detail)

A bit of rummaging around on the internet an Otago Daily Times article about the fact that "Fern Tree Cottage," now renamed "Ferntree Lodge" and described as "Dunedin's oldest house," is not only still standing, but was sold a couple of years ago after having belonged to "convicted fraudster Michael Swann." Here's a picture of it now, more than fifty years after Dick Scott's book first appeared:

Ferntree Lodge

So there you go, a Christmas gift that keeps on giving, forty years down the track …

Ans Westra: Hone Tuwhare at the side of James K. Baxter's grave (Hiruharama, October 1972)

Why I Like Tom Holland

Tom Holland

While I was in Wellington at the end of last year, I bought a copy of Persian Fire by Tom Holland. I knew I’d like it, as I’ve liked each of his previous books – sure enough, it proved ideal holiday reading: exciting, dramatic, well-researched and elegantly phrased.

Tom Holland (1968- )


1. Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. 2003. Abacus. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2006.
2. Holland, Tom. Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. 2005. Abacus. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006.
3. Holland, Tom. Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008.
4. Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. 2012. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2012.

I Claudius (1976)

Holland, as I understand it, began as a fiction writer (Attis (1995), The Bonehunter (2001), etc. etc.) then branched into popular history with his best-selling book Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. For a long time I resisted reading this book. Talk about a hackneyed subject! As well as all the books, there have even been numerous television series about the period! I Claudius, Rome: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian, it’s all been done.

Rome (2005-7)

But then, as I started to read, I began to realise why this one stood out from the ruck.

For a start Holland is clearly very well grounded in classics: he’s no journalistic opportunist, and he keeps up with the latest research, both historical and archaeological.

Above all, though, he’s an expert storyteller. I know that that sounds almost like an insult to most historians: it’s analytical ability and archive-hunting they prize, not the ability to turn a rattling good yarn.

But then, the art of the narrative historian is neither as easy nor as intellectually negligible as it may seem. Telling the story in a new way can bring out new connections and encourage a new overview. Nor should the art of bringing to life some period in the past ever be disprized as an objective. Holland is expert at assembling telling details which transform one’s understanding of some shopworn subject.

We know some things so well, or think that we know them so well, that we’ve stopped looking at them clearly. Persian Fire, for example, works mainly as a commentary on and (at times) paraphrase of Herodotus. I’ve read Herodotus many times, in various different translations, with varying degrees of annotation and commentary (Holland himself has just published his own translation, in fact).

Herodotus [Hēródotos] (c.484-c.425 BC)


1. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Ed. A. R. Burn. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
2. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Rev. John Marincola. 1996. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
3. Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007.
4. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Tom Holland. 2013. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2014.
5. de Selincourt, Aubrey. The World of Herodotus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962.

300 (2006)

I literally had no idea that so much remained to be said on the subject! How complex and nuanced a discussion Holland could make of each of the three major battles, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea (now familiar to filmgoers in somewhat caricatured form – though not so much as one might think - through Frank Miller’s big-screen epics 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014))

300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

What of his other books? Well, Millennium was thought-provoking but (I felt) a little tendentious in its attempt to discuss the long and complex story of the growth of the Christian Church at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire through a few key figures and occurrences. Interesting, but not finally entirely convincing.

In the Shadow of the Sword, by contrast, would be my pick for Holland’s masterpiece (to date, at any rate). It’s quite simply one of the most illuminating works of popular historiography I’ve ever read.

The initial contention, that we know far less about the life of Muhammad and the early days of Islam than we once thought we did, is surprising enough to anyone reasonably well read in the field. But Holland’s reconstruction of the intellectual world of the Middle East at the time of the Hegira was – to me, at least – completely new. I didn’t know so much could be known about a period so remote from us. And the painstaking work of recent scholars, admirably condensed by Holland into a simple and comprehensible narrative, results in a whole new understanding of the history of one of the world’s great religions.

I don’t feel this book has received anything like the notice it deserves. It will not “explain” recent events in the Middle East to you, or even feed into our simplistic notions of “East” and “West” – the unsubtle Orientalism that undermines most of our thinking about the region. But it will remind you of just why disinterested scholarship is valuable.

Holland is not an Orientalist – not is he an Academic. He’s just a very clever and empathetic person with a gift for retelling the past and an insatiable appetite for information. He’s the closest thing to an Edward Gibbon (in my humble opinion) the modern age has produced. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Tom Holland: In the Shadow of the Sword (2012)

The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce (1914)

Jünger, Ernst. Storm of Steel. 1920. Rev. ed. 1961. Trans. Michael Hofmann. Allen Lane. London: Penguin, 2003.

I recently bought a copy of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel [In Stahlgewittern] (1920), one of those great classic First World War memoirs I'd heard of but never read. The translator, poet Michael Hofmann, after making a number of cracks about the howlers in the only previous English translation (by Basil Creighton - in 1929), claims that "unlike any of the other World War I books I've read, Storm of Steel has found its way into natural epic form" (p.xviii).

He also discusses the book's immensely protracted genesis: how it evolved from the original, heavily diaristic version published in 1920, through the "Nationalist" text of 1924 (the one translated by Creighton), then the more toned-down, nuanced narrative of 1934 (the only one available to the Nazis, who revered Jünger, though he did not return the favour), until its final substantive rewriting for the first edition of his Collected Works in 1961.

Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel (1920)

Hofmann sees this multiplicity of texts as a distinct advantage:

The inspiration of most of the English [war memoirs] is lyrical or dramatic; they work with one-off contrasts and ironies; they fear repetition or excess of detail. They begin as they mean to go on, with misfortunes and reverses: [Robert] Graves shelled by his own artillery; [Edmund] Blunden's grenade instructor blowing himself up with a bad grenade; [Siegfried] Sassoon breaking a leg while riding before he ever gets to France. There is something bleakly - bracingly - comic about all three. … Storm of Steel leaves all that behind.

Certainly Hofmann is correct when he says that "there is nothing comic about Jünger whatsoever." Let's take that famous episode of the "Christmas truce," for example. Perhaps the most famous description of this is in Robert Graves's short story "Christmas Truce" (first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1962, and subsequently included in his Collected Short Stories (1965): 99-115).

Ernst Jünger (1920)

First, here's Jünger's account of Christmas 1915, from his chapter "Daily Life in the Trenches":

As Christmas approached, the weather seemed to worsen; we had recourse to pumps in our efforts to do something about the water. ["had recourse to" sounds like rather clumsy English to me: "were forced to use" would be my suggestion for something a bit more idiomatic. I wouldn't stress such a point if it weren't for the rather remorseless hatchet job Hofmann does (pp. xiv-xvi) on Creighton's earlier translation. His own seems to veer strangely between the wildly colloquial and the stiff and pedantic, but for all I know that's an accurate reflection of Jünger's prose style in German - Ed.] During this muddy phase, our losses also worsened …

We spent Christmas Eve in the line, and, standing in the mud, sang hymns, to which the British responded with machine-gun fire. On Christmas Day, we lost one man to a ricochet in the head. Immediately afterwards, the British attempted a friendly gesture by hauling a Christmas tree up on their traverse, but our angry troops quickly shot it down again, to which Tommy replied with rifle-grenades. it was all in all a less than merry Christmas. [pp. 58-59]

Robert Graves: Collected Short Stories (1965)

Graves, Robert. Collected Short Stories. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, n.d.

Let's contrast this with Graves's version. Well, first of all, there's a frame-story. A couple of old soldiers are educating Stanley the "Polytechnic student", who's asked them to accompany him on a "Ban the Bomb" march. Impatient with their attitude, Stan bursts out:

"Oh, can it, Grandfather! ... You're a professional pessimist And you didn't hate the Germans even when you were fighting them - in spite of the newspapers. What about that Christmas Truce?" [p.101]

But the point, according to them, is not so much the "Christmas truce" itself, as its follow-up the year after:

"Tell this lad about the two Christmas truces," I said [to his mate Dodger Green, who's just dropped by], "He's trying to enlist us for a march to Moscow, or somewhere."

Stan's grandfather was wounded in hospital at the time, so he saw nothing of the complex festivities, football games, magic show, slap-up feed, which Dodger describes. Even then, in 1914, there were exceptions:

the Prussians weren't having any. Nor were some English regiments: such as the East Lancs on our right flank and the Sherwood Foresters on the left - when the Fritzes came out with white flags, they fired over their heads and waved 'em back. But they didn't interfere with our party. It was worse in the French line: them Frogs machine-gunned all the "Merry Christmas" parties … Of course, the French go in for New Year celebrations more than Christmas. [pp. 105-6]

When it came to Christmas 1915, however, Stan's grandfather takes up the tale:

"Keep in your trenches, Wessex!" [Colonel Pomeroy] shouted over his shoulder. And [Major Coburg] gave the same orders to his lot.

"After jabbering a bit they agreed that any bloke who'd attended the 1914 party would be allowed out of trenches, but none of the rest - they could only trust us regular soldiers. Regulars, you see, know the rules of war and don't worry their heads about politics nor propaganda; them Duration blokes sickened us sometimes with their patriotism and their lofty skiting, and their hatred of 'the Teuton foe' as one of 'em called the Fritzes." [p.112]

The party this time is a disaster. One of the British soldiers seizes the opportunity to take revenge for "a brother killed at Loos" [p.114]. Even though he only wounds rather than killing the German officer he shoots, the damage is done. The British colonel is court-martialled, and there is no further fraternising between the two sides. Stan's grandfather's conclusion is a pessimistic one:

"Now listen, lad: if two real old-fashioned gentlemen like Colonel Pomeroy and Major Coburg - never heard of him again, but I doubt if he survived, having the guts he had - if two real men like them two couldn't hope for a their Christmas Truce in the days when 'mankind', as you call 'em, was still a little bit civilised, tell me, what can you hope for now?" [p.115]

Dodger, however, has a less gloomy take on the whole affair: "… don't listen to your Grand-dad. Don't be talked out of your beliefs! He's one of the Old and Bold, but maybe he's no wiser nor you and I."

Hofmann's commendation of what he sees as the "Homeric" reticence of Jünger's version comes, in part, from its chronology:

As well as being one of the earliest books on World War I ["published long before the likes of Blunden, Graves, Remarque and Sassoon, all of which appeared in the later 1920s, at a classic ten-year distance from the events they describe, giving their public and themselves time to recover" (p.viii)], Storm of Steel is also one of the newest, and it seems likely that it gained in both respects. If one might put it like this, in addition to outflanking the competition by getting in ahead of them, Storm of Steel also outlasted them: the experience it offers the reader is both more immediate and more considered, more naively open-ended and more artistically complex, more Sartre-ish and more - what shall I say? - Paterian. [p.xiii]

Now it's certainly true that the contrast between Jünger's and Graves's version of Christmas 1915 does not come out heavily in favour of the latter. Graves's story is a bit neat, a bit magazine-ish, which is possibly why he did not include any of this material in his own "classic" war memoir, Good-bye to All That (1929 - also heavily revised in its 1957 edition, which rather makes nonsense of Hofmann's claims for the superior "consideration" Jünger was able to give his own book).

Robert Graves

But one can't really have it all ways at once. Having read this encomium on Jünger's epic, it came as a bit of a shock to turn to the book itself. Even Hofmann grants that "Sometimes the progress seems slow and a little lumbering," combining all the various elements of the narrative into "one great narcotic experience." It is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite a boring book. At first, at any rate - certainly to readers used to the "one-off contrasts and ironies" of Graves, Sassoon and Blunden: their sheer story-telling ability, in other words.

This is not to say that I don't see Hofmann's point. There is a cumulative effect to Jünger's writing which is quite different to that of the great English and French memoirists and novelists of the war - different, too, from other German authors such as Erich Maria Remarque or Arnold Zweig. But "Sartre-ish and … Paterian"! Is he relying on the fact that no-one really reads Marius the Epicurean anymore, let alone Pater's less well-known works (with the possible exception of that one piece of prose poetry about the Mona Lisa which Yeats re-lineated and included in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse)? Hofmann himself admits:

I could never understand, unless it was for doctrinal political reasons, why Sartre, asked about Jünger, said merely: "I hate him." [p. xx]

Well, duh! Whatever the complexities of his relations with the Nazis, the fact that a good many of his problems with them stemmed from the fact that they weren't nationalistic enough (a bit like Heidegger, who saw Hitler and his mob of thugs as too "compromised by modernity" to preserve the purity of their Germanic ideals) might have something to do with explaining why so prominent an anti-fascist as Sartre might quite simply hate a silly old fool like Ernst Jünger.

Storm of Steel may or may not be a great book. It's certainly an interesting book - though frighteningly unreflective about the larger implications of the communal bloodletting Ernst and his comrades are indulging in (perhaps the "Homeric" quality Hofmann detects so readily in it comes more from the moral and ethical blindness displayed by the narrator than from any true approach to the unsentimental - though not, I would argue unfeeling - objectivity of the author of the Iliad).

I can't accept that it is any real rival to the great war memoirs of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon - or, for that matter, for the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg or Edward Thomas. Their humanity and compassion continues to speak to us over the century that has elapsed since the first Christmas Truce (if such an event ever really took place, except symbolically). Jünger, for me, is more of a horrible warning - of what happens when you subtract those elements from a person, either through nature or nurture, but instead simply train him to kill and be killed.

It's possible, then, that Hofmann is right, and Jünger has more to say to us this Christmas, as the Ukraine burns and ISIL marches on the beleaguered ancient cities of Mesopotamia, about the true nature of humanity right here, right now. I don't agree with his implicit denigration of Robert Graves and the other "English memoirists" as at least equally valid commentators on the nature of war, though. What's more, when one considers that Graves published his first book of war poems in 1916, and his last stories on the subject of the war in the 1960s, Hofmann's arguments for Jünger's "outflanking the competition" begin to look a bit flimsy, also.

Robert Graves: A Dead Boche (1916)

Here's a list of some classic WWI books from my collection (I haven't bothered to include very much fiction in this list, though of course Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Ford's Parade's End, and - more recently - Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy are all potentially relevant: not to mention well worth reading - or rereading, for that matter):

Richard Aldington (1892–1962)


1. Death of a Hero: A Novel. 1929. The Phoenix Library. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.
2. The Complete Poems. London: Allan Wingate (Publishers) Limited, 1948.

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935)


3. Under Fire: The Story of a Squad / Light. 1916 & 1919. Trans. Fitzwater Wray. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1929.

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)


4. Undertones of War. 1928. London: Penguin, 1937.
5. The Poems: 1914-30. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)


6. Marsh, Edward, ed. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir. 1918. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1920.
7. 1914 and Other Poems. London: Faber, 1941.
8. The Complete Poems. 1932. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited / Melbourne: Hicks, Smith & Wright, 1944.
9. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke. 1946. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1974.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)


10. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
11. Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.
12. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929.
13. Good-bye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
14. Collected Short Stories. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, n.d.
15. In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
16. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work. 1982. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1983.
17. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1986.
18. Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. 1995. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1996.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)


19. Collected Poems. Ed. P. J. Kavanagh. 1982. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004.

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923)


20. The Good Soldier Schweik. Trans. Paul Selver. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
21. The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War. Trans. Cecil Parrott. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
22. The Red Commissar: Including Further Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk and Other Stories. Trans. Cecil Parrott. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1981. London: Abacus, 1983.
23. Parrott, Sir Cecil. The Bad Bohemian: A Life of Jaroslav Hašek, Creator of the Good Soldier Švejk. 1978. London: Abacus, 1983.

David Jones (1895-1974)


24. In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu. 1937. London: Faber, 1963.
25. Hague, René, ed. Dai Greatcoat: A Self-portrait of David Jones in his Letters. London: Faber, 1980.
26. Matthias, John, ed. Introducing David Jones: A Selection of His Writings. Preface by Stephen Spender. London: Faber, 1980.
27. Blissett, William. The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935)


28. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. 1926. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1946.
29. Revolt in the Desert. New York: Garden City Publishing Company Inc., 1927.
30. Garnett, David, ed. The Essential T. E. Lawrence. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
31. Garnett, David, ed. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.
32. Thomas, Lowell. With Lawrence in Arabia. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., 1924.
33. Liddell Hart, B. H. ‘T. E. Lawrence’: In Arabia and After. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1934.
34. Lawrence, A. W., ed. T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.
35. Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. London: Collins, 1955.
36. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. 1976. New Preface by the Author. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.
37. Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence. 1989. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1990.

Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917)


38. The Complete Poems. Introduction by Lord Dunsany. 1919. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1955.

C. S. Lewis [as 'Clive Hamilton'] (1898–1963)


39. Spirits in Bondage (1919). In C. S. Lewis. Collected Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper. 1919, 1964. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1994.

John Masefield (1878-1967)


40. Gallipoli. 1916. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935.
41. The Old Front Line, or The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1917.
42. St. George and the Dragon. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1919.
43. Collected Poems. 1923. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1926.
44. Vansittart, Peter, ed. John Masefield’s Letters from the Front, 1915-1917. London: Constable and Company Limited, 1984.
45. John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works. Ed. Philip W. Errington. Pen & Sword Military Classics. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2007.

R. H. Mottram (1883–1971)


46. The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914-1918. 1924, 1925, 1926 & 1927. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)


47. Day Lewis, C., ed. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1963. Memoir by Edmund Blunden. 1931. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.
48. War Poems and Others. Ed. Dominic Hibberd. 1973. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 46. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1975.
49. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1985. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988.
50. Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen & John Bell. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
51. Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Revised and Enlarged Edition. 1960. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1978.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)


52. All Quiet on the Western Front. 1929. Trans. A. W. Wheen. 1929. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930.

Frank Richards [aka Francis Philip Woodruff] (1883-1961)


53. Old Soldiers Never Die. 1933. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].
54. Old Soldier Sahib. Introduction by Robert Graves. 1936. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].

Jules Romains (1885-1972)


55. Verdun. 1938. Trans. Gerard Hopkins. 1939. London: Peter Davies, 1940.

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)


56. Parsons, Ian, ed. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings and Drawings. Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)


57. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1947.
58. Collected Poems 1908-1956. 1961. London: Faber, 1984.
59. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.
60. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.
61. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. The Faber Library, 2. London: Faber, 1932.
62. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.
63. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress. 1937. Published by the Reprint Society Ltd. by Arrangement with Faber and Faber. London: World Books, 1940.
64. Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920. The Albatross Modern Continental Library, 558. London & Paris: The Albatross Ltd., 1947.
65. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Book Club Associates, 1983.
66. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.
67. Diaries 1923-1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.
68. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886-1918. 1998. New York: Routledge, 1999.
69. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography 1918-1967. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2003.

Charles Sorley (1895-1915)


70. Marlborough and Other Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)


71. Poems and Last Poems (Arranged in Chronological Order of Composition). Ed. Edna Longley. 1917 & 1918. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London & Glasgow: Collins Publishers, 1973.
72. Collected Poems. Foreword by Walter de la Mare. 1920. London & Boston: Faber, 1979.
73. The Collected Poems. Ed. R. George Thomas. 1978. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
74. The Annotated Collected Poems. Ed. Edna Longley. 2008. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2011.
75. Thomas, Helen, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm’s Wing: As It Was, World without End &c. 1926, 1931 & 1988. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
76. Hollis, Matthew. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. 2011. London: Faber, 2012.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)


77. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. 2003. London: HarperColllins, 2004.

Arnold Zweig (1887-1968)


78. The Case of Sergeant Grischa. 1927. Trans. Eric Sutton. 1928. London: Martin Secker, 1929.
79. Education before Verdun. 1935. Trans. Eric Sutton. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1936.

Escape


80. Evans, A. J. The Escaping Club. 1921. Penguin 202: Travel and Adventure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.
81. Harrison, Major M. C. C., & Capt H. A. Cartwright. Within Four Walls: A Classic of Escape. 1930. Penguin 281: Travel and Adventure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940.
82. Hervey, H. E. Cage-Birds. 1940. Penguin 287. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.
83. Jones, E. H. The Road to En-Dor: Being an Account of How Two Prisoners of War at Yozgad in Turkey Won Their Way to Freedom. 1929. The Week-End Library. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1930.

Historical


84. Allison, William, & John Fairley. The Monocled Mutineer. 1978. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1986.
85. Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis: 1911-1918. 1923, 1927. Rev. ed. 1931. A Four Square Book. London: Landsborough Publications Limited, 1960.
86. Clark, Alan. Aces High: The War in the Air over the Western Front 1914-18. 1973. London: Fontana / Collins, 1974.
87. Lewis, Cecil. Sagittarius Rising. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
88. Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
89. Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
90. Middlebrook, Martin. The Kaiser’s Battle. 21 March 1918: The First Day of the German Spring Offensive. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
91. Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
92. Toland, John. No Man’s Land: The Story of 1918. 1980. Methuen Paperbacks. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1982.
93. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Zimmermann Telegram. 1958. London: Constable, 1959.
94. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
95. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
96. Wolff, Ian. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. 1958. London: Pan Books, 1961.

Miscellaneous


97. Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. London: Constable and Compnay Ltd., 1965.
98. Cross, Tim, ed. The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets & Playwrights. 1988. London: Bloomsbury
99. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Oxford Paperbacks, 385. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
100. Fussell, Paul, ed. The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. A Scribners Book. London: Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1991.
101. Hayward, James. Myths and Legends of the First World War. 2002. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2010.
102. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. 1990. London: Pimlico, 1992.
103. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. 1997. Pimlico. London: Random House, 1998.
104. Korte, Barbara, with Ann-Marie Einhaus, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Stories. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2007.
105. Macdonald, Lyn. 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
106. Nichols, Robert, ed. Anthology of War Poetry 1914-1918. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943.
107. Ricketts, Harry. Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War. 2010. Pimlico 860. London: Random House, 2012.
108. Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. 1979. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin, 1981.
109. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
110. Stallworthy, Jon. Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War. 2002. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2003.
111. Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.